Our fantastic speakers and tutors

Klas Ljungkvist

CIO at SBAB

Keynote

Klas was actually an engineer in physics – believe it or not – but spent more or less his whole professional career within fintech. He started off as a software developer – leaving a trail of a few ugly hacks still running in production at several sites – from there onwards continuing in various management roles.

Jonathan Bryce

Executive Director at OpenStack Foundation

Keynote

Jonathan Bryce is executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, where he serves the community of people who build and operate open infrastructure. He spent his early career building cloud services and established the Foundation in 2012 after helping Rackspace open source its cloud operating system along with NASA in 2010.

Previously, Jonathan was a founder of the Rackspace Cloud. Since his early days at Rackspace, Jonathan has always been passionate about open source and its ubiquity in the datacenter. He believes the future of computing must be open, and is driven by the incredible stories of organizations — enterprises, research institutes and governments — who are changing the world with open source technologies.

Johan Christenson

Member of the OpenStack Board of Directors

Keynote

Johan Christenson is a serial entrepreneur whom has successfully exited multiple companies he founded. After receiving a graduate degree in Engineering, from Florida Institute of Technology, his focus turned to the digital media space. He has raised money both in the US and Europe from venture capical firms such as Benchmark Capital and Balderton Capital.

Johan is the founder and CEO of City Network, which offers a global public cloud as well as private clouds for enterprises - all based on OpenStack. City Networks mission is to enable innovation and focuses on enterprises with regulatory challenges such as banks and insurance companies.

Johan sees OpenStack as critical for all enterprises in order to provide options and create competition in an ever more centralized infrastructure world. He, and the team at City, empower new types of industries and markets to use the power of OpenStack, to enable and increase innovation in their organisations.

Christopher Price

Member of the OpenStack Board of Directors

Keynote

I am focused on, and passionate about, open source technologies for next generation networks. Primarily a developer my career has been focused on building and deploying networking technologies for global and carrier networks, more recently my attention has turned to open source community and technology advancement.

A strong believer in collaborative development and open technology ecosystem enablement I am fully invested in exposing technology through open source for global adoption and advancement.

Thierry Carrez

VP of Engineering at OpenStack Foundation

Keynote

Thierry Carrez is the Vice-President of Engineering at the OpenStack Foundation, in charge of the long-term health of the open source projects under the Foundation. A long-time elected member of the OpenStack Technical Committee, he has been a Release Manager for the OpenStack project since its inception, coordinating the effort and facilitating collaboration between contributors.

Thierry spoke about OpenStack, open innovation and open source project management at various conferences around the world, including OSCON, LinuxCon, and FOSDEM. A Python Software Foundation fellow, he was previously the Technical lead for Ubuntu Server at Canonical, an operational manager for the Gentoo Linux Security Team, and an IT manager in various companies.

Simon Briggs

EMEA Cloud Technical Strategist at SUSE

Simon Briggs

Simon Briggs is having nearly 20 years of experience in the IT industry after starting out as a junior Unix system admin's and then into software support. Initially he was focused on Windows and Unix/Linux systems management and ITSM.

Though, as he enjoy presenting and meeting people the lions share of his career has been in Pre-Sales roles, this background then affording him the opportunity to join SUSE over 7 years ago. Initially working as UK SUSE Solutions Architect but have now happily become the full time EMEA Lead Solutions Architect for SUSE OpenStack Cloud for a couple of years.

He is a keen advocate of Open Source and standards for what this offers to society as a whole and he is frequently involved in Meetups on related subjects, having presented at the London, Netherlands and Oslo OpenStack Meetup's and more general Linux sessions.

Chris Van Tuin

Chief Technologist at Red Hat

Chris Van Tuin, Chief Technologist, NA West at Red Hat, has over 20 years of experience in IT and Software. Since joining Red Hat in 2005, Chris has been architecting solutions for strategic customers and partners and is a frequent speaker on DevOps, Security, and Containers. He started his career at Intel in IT and Managed Hosting followed by leadership roles in services and sales engineering at Loudcloud and Linux startups. Chris holds a Bachelors of Electrical Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology.

Dilip Renkila

OpenStack architect at Linserv AB

I am Dilip Renkila currently working as a Cloud Architect at Linserv AB based in Stockholm. We at Linserv AB are proud to implement Openstack cloud entirely with opensource solutions like Ceph(storage), OpenNetworkLinux(Switches). My main area focus is in planning, implementing and managing Openstack. I am a big Fan of Ceph and OpenFlow. I have been working on Trove DBaaS since this year and successfully migrated more than 100 postgresql instances into trove. I have also introduced features like automatic backup, performance monitoring to Trove instances. I think my experience will help Openstack folks. Frankly i don’t know about One Direction.

Tobias Rydberg

Team Lead R&D and Senior Developer at City Network

Senior software developer at the OpenStack based public cloud City Network, based in Sweden but with locations around the globe. More than 10 years of industry experience.

Tobias main focus is developing City Networks cloud management platform - used for all our OpenStack installations - and other cool complementary features. Also spending some good time maintaining our installations.

Big fan of OpenStack, been around it for a couple of years now. Proud to have been given the opportunity to co-chair the Public Cloud Working group.

Maxime Guyot

Technical Team Lead at ELITS

I’m a system engineer passionated with IT and open source technologies. I specialize in Software Defined Infrastructure like Openstack, Kubernetes and Ceph. I’ve lead multiple Cloud deployments in both public and private cloud use cases.

Rossella Sblendido

Team Lead Networking at SUSE

Rossella Sblendido is involved in OpenStack since Essex. She had been core reviewer for Neutron for several releases and she’s now a member of the Technical Steering Committee of OPNFV and part of the Technical Advisory Committee of the Linux Foundation Networking Fund.

Michal Rostecki

Software Engineer at SUSE

Oliver Naegele

Founder & CEO at Blockchain HELIX

Keynote

Oliver is one of the world's authorities in the aspects of Digital Identity, Blockchain and KYC. He has acquired a deep understanding for digital authority management during his 15-year-long career in IT security. He is the initiator of the Blockchain Frankfurt MeetUp and of the German wide network FinTech Headquarter. He is also one of the founding members of the Germany Blockchain Federal Association. Currently Oliver is running an initial coin offering for his latest project HELIX Orange, a blockchain driven platform for ICOs and investors.

Monty Taylor

Open Source Cloud Executive at Red Hat

Monty currently leads the team that works on the Zuul project for CI/CD in Red Hat's CTO Office. He's the founder, core member and past PTL of the OpenStack Infra team which runs CI and developer tooling for OpenStack. He's a past member of both the OpenStack Technical Committee and the OpenStack Foundation Board of Directors. Monty is the PTL of the shade/python-openstacksdk project and is the maintainer of the Ansible modules for consuming OpenStack. Before his OpenStack days he was a core developer on Drizzle and was a Senior Consultant for MySQL, Inc.

Monty has a degree in Theatre Directing and went to grad school at CalArts in lighting design. The intersection of fields has led him to start more than one business around developing technology for and related to live performance. Recently Monty served as an Adjunct Professor at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts teaching a class on programming related to lighting design. If you let him, he'll talk to you WAY too much about Scuba Diving.

Masoud Fatollahy

Masoud Fatollahy, working as Senior Engineering Solution/Specialist on NFV/NFVI, Cloud, SDN, Openstack, IoT, 5G and networking area I am working close to the customers, to help them with system architecture and solution for building their cloud environment and moving their applications and features which are running on dedicated hardware to virtual environment without losing any performance, security and management capabilities. I am working with Wind River best in class cloud solution called Titanium Cloud which is a high-performance, high-availability, cloud operating system that enables telecommunications operators to use Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware to manage Virtualized Network Functions (VNF) within a carrier grade Network Function Virtualization (NFV) architecture.

Kenneth Tan

Technical Director at Sardina Systems

Dr Kenneth Tan has been in the large scale systems sector for 18+ years. At Sardina Systems, Kenneth leads the product development team responsible for building OpenStack automation software, to optimize OpenStack cloud operations. He was previously with CloudFabriQ, BNP Paribas, OptimaNumerics, in product development and business development roles, involving products and services sold to major data center operators in automotive,energy, defense, meteo, finance. He has led teams in UK, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Estonia, Germany.

Ildiko Vancsa

Ecosystem Technical Lead at OpenStack

Ildikó started her journey with virtualization during the university years and has been in connection with this technology different ways since then. She started her career at a small research and development company in Budapest, where she was focusing on areas like system management and business process modelling and optimization. Ildikó got in touch with OpenStack when she started to work in the cloud project at Ericsson in 2013. She is a member of the Ceilometer and Aodh core teams and she drives NFV related feature development activities in projects like Nova and Cinder. Beyond code and documentation contributions she is also very passionate about on boarding and training activities, which is one of her focus areas within the OpenStack Foundation.

Florian Haas

VP Professional Services & Education at City Network, Managing Director at hastexo

I run the Professional Services & Education BU at City Network, and help people learn to use, understand, and deploy services like Ceph, OpenStack, and Kubernetes. I’ve worked exclusively with open source software since about 2002, have been involved in OpenStack and Ceph since early 2012, and in Open edX since mid-2015. I co-founded hastexo, a professional services company where I served as CEO and Principal Consultant until our acquisition by City Network in October 2017. I have presented at several OpenStack Summits, LCAs, Linux Foundation events, O’Reilly OSCON, and numerous other conferences and meetups, but this presentation (if accepted) would be my first PyCon talk.

Johan Tordssson

CTO/Co-founder Elastisys & Assoc. Prof. Umeå Universit

Johan Tordsson is CTO and co-founder of Elastisys and holds a PhD in computer science. He is passionate about cloud automation, DevOps, and autonomic computing and is a strong believer that artificial intelligence will revolutionize IT operations. Tordsson has a background as developer, chief architect, and scientific coordinator in multiple large-scale European research projects on cloud resource management. He also holds a part-time appointment as Associate Professor at Umeå University. In 2016, he won the Nordea Scientific Award for his research contributions within self-optimizing and self-healing data centers.